Next up, AnsibleWorks

It’s official! AnsibleWorks, the company behind Ansible, the simple and secure orchestration platform, has opened its doors for business.

I’m proud to announce that I will be leading this startup as CEO, alongside some talented engineers that I had the pleasure to work with before. We will be based in Santa Barbara, California, with offices in Raleigh and the Bay Area.

A quick background..

I was at Red Hat for 10 years, ever since the days when we sold magazine and T-shirts to cover payroll :) until it achieved $1B in revenue and became the first Open Source company to claim this victory. It was a wonderful journey and a great way to master the Open Source distribution model and to gain a understanding of the influence it has on Infrastructure and the Enterprise world.

Amazon’s AWS has since made a big impact, transforming the IT market, and creating an unprecedented disruption in acquiring and managing infrastructure resources. Cloud has become The Thing, so I decided to join Eucalyptus Systems at the end of 2010, an on-premise IaaS startup, which has also gained much traction because of its API compatibility with AWS and its ability to give Enterprises an on-premise AWS look and feel.

What I’ve learned..

Now that the shift to cloud has gained strong momentum, managing infrastructure, whether on-premise or off, and consistently, has become real challenge. All segments, whether Federal, large Enterprises, or modern Web 2.0 companies, struggle with managing infrastructure. No single technology was complete enough to do the job right.

My next move..

So, in January this year, I decided to embark in the system orchestration space with Ansible. As mentioned before, over the years, I have noticed many gaps in configuration management automation space: complex, hard to maintain solutions and incomplete products were just a few. The majority of the users today have to deploy more than one tool just to complete the picture of deployment, configuration and management. Many had to augment these tools with their own scripts, giving way to a maintenance nightmare. This meant too much time spent on automation and little time on building products.

Ansible came out about 12 months ago as a fully Open Source project to address these issues, founded by Michael DeHaan, a veteran in this space and the author of Cobbler, a Linux installation server that is deployed all over the world. He spent nights and weekends making sure Ansible avoided these existing traps. The project gained a great amount of traction in such a short period and the use cases have quickly expanded beyond just simple deployment and configuration management to being the go to orchestration platform around big data, cloud, and even next generation networking.

Ansible is:

simple, secure, and easy to use

production ready, and

scalable, where it’s now being used to manage thousands of nodes

Both large Enterprises and growing startups are using Ansible and have already contributed in many areas to the project. In fact, this past February, Ansible had more contributors than any other project in the configuration management space.

AnsibleWorks will now have an engineering team to help in the growth of Ansible. Our customers and community will now have extensive areas of expertise to reach out to. Our commitment to the community, that has done a fabulous job getting Ansible to where Ansible is today, will continue to be strong.

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Co-Founder & CEO
Saïd has over 20 years of experience in leadership, sales and engineering. He spent over 10 years at Red Hat, where he managed a global accounts team accountable for over $100M in annual revenue. Saïd holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a Masters degree in Information Systems from Northeastern University.